Help Please importing flat text

[scottedge]

Hi I have a word document that is formated as such

ARTIST - CD Title [return]

Body of Text (lenght various per entry but always ends in a ")") [return]

Record Company [return]

website (not included on all entries) [return]

The bold and italics are formated in the document. I would need to update these files to a database every two months. I know there is some information about scripting where you can extract rows but it confused me. Is there any way I can convert this text either to excel first. Thanks for any help. I hope i'm clear in my problem.

p.s. this message board is very impressive in both knwoledge and design. Spell check is dope.

scott

[CobaltSky]

Hello Scott,

There are a few different ways to approach this, but one option you might like to consider would be creating a macro within Word which will replace the returns ater each occurrence of the Artist, Body text and Record Co lines with tabs (leaving the return after the website), then saves the resulting file as text.

Once you have run the macro, the text file will be ready to import as 'tab-delimited text' into FileMaker. The content will come up into four separate fields, and you can then display the fields on a layout (formatted appropriately to replicate the bold and italicised formats of the word.doc content).

Probably the easiest route will be if there are multiple (eg double) returns after each URL in the Word document. Your Macro can then search first for double returns (and replace them with a placeholder such as ?). Then it can replace all returns with tabs (Word uses ^p to represent a carriage return and ^t to signify a tab in its find and replace operations) and finally replace all occurrences of ? with a (single) carriage return.

If you have access to some inter-application scripting tools (eg AppleScript, VisualBasic, QuickKeys etc) you might even want to try setting the whole procedure up to run from a single script in your FileMaker database - but that is a bit beyond what you were asking, I guess...